The Holocaust Industry (2 page)

and Historical Truth
(New York 1998), 91n83, 96n90. His record elsewhere
is

no better. In a new memoir,
And the Sea Is Never FuR
(New York 1999),

Wiesel offers this incred ble explanation for his silence on Palestinian suffering

"In spite of considerable pressure, I have refused
to
take a public stand in the

Isracb-Arab convict" (125). In his finely detailed survey of Holocaust literature,

literary critic Irving Howe dispatched Wiesel's vast corpus m one lone

paragraph with the faint praise that "Ebe Wiesel's first book,
Night,
[is] written

simply and without rhetorical indulgence." "There has been nothing worth

reading since
Night,"
literary critic Alfred Kazin agrees. "EIie is now all actor.

Redescribed himself to me as a 'lecturer in anguish.'» (Irving Howe, «writing

and the Holocaust," in
New Republic
[27 October 19861; Alfred Kazin,
A

Lifetime
Earning in
Every Moment [New
York 19961, 179)

3
New York: 1999. Norman Einkelstein, "uses of the Holocaust," in
London

Review of Book (6
January 2000).

4
Novick,
The Holocaust,
3 - 6.

5
Raul Hilberg,
The Destruction of the European Jews
(New York: 1961).

Viktor Frankl,
Man's Search for Meaning
(New York 19Sg). Ella

Lingens-Reiner,
Prisoners of Fear (London
1948).

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Chapter 1

CAPITALIZING THE HOLOCAUST

In a memorable exchange some years back, Gore Vidal accused Norman Podhoretz, then-editor of the

American Jewish Committee publication
Commentary,
of being un-American.
1
The evidence was that

Podhoretz attached less importance to the Civil War - "the great single tragic event that continues to

give resonance to our Republic" - than to Jewish concerns. Yet Podhoretz was perhaps more American

than his accuser. For by then it was the "War Against the Jews," not the "War Between the States,"

that figured as more central to American cultural life. Most college professors can testify that

compared to the Civil War many more undergraduates are able to place the Nazi holocaust in the right

century and generally cite the number killed. In fact, the Nazi holocaust is just about the only

historical reference that resonates in a university classroom today. Polls show that many more

Americans can identify The Holocaust than Pearl Harbor or the atomic bombing of Japan.

Until fairly recently, however, the Nazi holocaust barely figured in American life. Between the end of

World War II and the late 1960s, only a handful of books and films touched on the subject. There was

only one university course offering in the United States on the topic.
2
When Hannah Arendt published

Eichmann in Jerusalem
in 1963, she could draw on only two scholarly studies in the English language

-Gerald Reitlinger's
The Final Solution
and Raul Hilberg's
The Destruction of the European Jews.
3

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Hilberg's masterpiece itself just managed to see the light of day. His thesis advisor at Columbia

University, the German-Jewish social theorist Franz Neumann, strongly discouraged him from writing

on the topic ('it's your funeral»), and no university or mainstream publisher would touch the completed

manuscript. When it was finally published,
The Destruction of the European Jews
received only a

few, mostly critical, notices.
4

Not only Americans in general but also American Jews, including Jewish intellectuals, paid the Nazi

holocaust little heed. In an authoritative 1957 survey, sociologist Nathan Glazer reported that the Nazi

Final Solution (as well as Israel) «had remarkably slight effects on the inner life of American Jewry.»

In a 1961
Commentary
symposium on "Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals," only two of

thirty-one contributors stressed its impact. Likewise, a 1961 roundtable convened by the journal

Judaism
of twenty-one observant American Jews on "My Jewish Affirmation» almost completely

ignored the subject.
5
No monuments or tributes marked the Nazi holocaust in the United States. To

the contrary, major Jewish organizations opposed such memorialization. The question is, Why?

The standard explanation is that Jews were traumatized by the Nazi holocaust and therefore repressed

the memory of it. In fact, there is no evidence to support this conclusion. No doubt some survivors did

not then or, for that matter, in later years want to speak about what had happened. Many others,

however, very much wanted to speak and, once the occasion availed itself, wouldn't stop speaking.
6

The problem was that Americans didn't want to listen.

The real reason for public silence on the Nazi extermination was the conformist policies of the

American Jewish leadership and the political climate of postwar America. In both domestic and

international affairs American Jewish elites
7
hewed closely to official US policy. Doing so in effect

facilitated the traditional goals of assimilation and access to power. With the inception of the Cold

War, mainstream Jewish organizations jumped into the fray. American Jewish elites "forgot» the Nazi

holocaust because Germany — West Germany by 1949 — became a crucial postwar American ally in

the US confrontation with the Soviet Union. Dredging up the past served no useful purpose; in fact it

complicated matters.

With minor reservations (soon discarded), major American Jewish organizations quickly fell into line

with US support for a rearmed and barely de-Nazified Germany. The American Jewish Committee

(AJC), fearful that "any organized opposition of American Jews against the new foreign policy and

strategic approach could isolate them in the eyes of the non-Jewish majority and endanger their

postwar achievements on the domestic scene," was the first to preach the virtues of realignment. The

pro-Zionist World Jewish Congress (WJC) and its American affiliate dropped opposition after signing

compensation agreements with Germany in the early 1 950s, while the Anti-Defamation League

(ADL) was the first major Jewish organization to send an official delegation to Germany, in 1954.

Together these organizations collaborated with the Bonn government to contain the "anti-German

wave" of Jewish popular sentiment.
8

The Final Solution was a taboo topic of American Jewish elites for yet another reason. Leftist Jews,

who were opposed to the Cold War alignment with Germany against the Soviet Union, would not stop

harping on it. Remembrance of the Nazi holocaust was tagged as a Communist cause. Strapped with

the stereotype that conflated Jews with the Left — in fact, Jews did account for a third of the vote for

progressive presidential candidate Henry Wallace in 1948 — American Jewish elites did not shrink

from sacrificing fellow Jews on the altar of anti-Communism. Offering their files on alleged Jewish

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subversives to government agencies, the AJC and the ADL actively collaborated in the McCarthy-era

witch-hunt. The AJC endorsed the death penalty for the Rosenbergs, while its monthly publication,

Commentary,
editorialized that they weren't
really
Jews.

Fearful of association with the political Left abroad and at home, mainstream Jewish organizations

opposed cooperation with anti-Nazi German social-democrats as well as boycotts of German

manufactures and public demonstrations against ex-Nazis touring the United States. On the other

hand, prominent visiting German dissidents like Protestant pastor Martin Niemöller, who had spent

eight years in Nazi concentration camps and was now against the anti-Communist crusade, suffered

the obloquy of American Jewish leaders. Anxious to boost their anti-Communist credentials, Jewish

elites even enlisted in, and financially sustained, right-wing extremist organizations like the

All-American Conference to Combat Communism and turned a blind eye as veterans of the Nazi SS

entered the country.
9

Ever anxious to ingratiate themselves with US ruling elites and dissociate themselves from the Jewish

Left, organized American Jewry did invoke the Nazi holocaust in one special context: to denounce the

USSR. "Soviet [anti-Jewish] policy opens up opportunities which must not be overlooked,» an

internal AJC memorandum quoted by Novick gleefully noted, "to reinforce certain aspects of AJC

domestic program." Typically, that meant bracketing the Nazi Final Solution with Russian

anti-Semitism. "Stalin will succeed where Hitler failed,"
Commentary
direly predicted. «He will

finally wipe out the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe.... The parallel with the policy of Nazi

extermination is almost complete.» Major American Jewish organizations even denounced the 1956

Soviet invasion of Hungary as "only the first station on the way to a Russian Auschwitz.
10

Everything changed with the June 1967 Arab Israeli war. By virtually all accounts, it was only after

this conflict that The Holocaust became a fixture in American Jewish life.
11
The standard explanation

of this transformation is that Israel's extreme isolation and vulnerability during the June war revived

memories of the Nazi extermination. In fact, this analysis misrepresents both the reality of Mideast

power relations at the time and the nature of the evolving relationship between American Jewish elites

and Israel.

Just as mainstream American Jewish organizations downplayed the Nazi holocaust in the years after

World War II to conform to the US government's Cold War priorities, so their attitude to Israel kept in

step with US policy. From early on, American Jewish elites harbored profound misgivings about a

Jewish state. Uppermost was their fear that it would lend credence to the "dual loyalty" charge. As the

Cold War intensified, these worries multiplied. Already before the founding of Israel, American

Jewish leaders voiced concern that its largely Eastern European, left-wing leadership would join the

Soviet camp. Although they eventually embraced the Zionist-led campaign for statehood, American

Jewish organizations closely monitored and adjusted to signals from Washington. Indeed, the AJC

supported Israel's founding mainly out of fear that a domestic backlash against Jews might ensue if the

Jewish DPs in Europe were not quickly settled.
12
Although Israel aligned with the West soon after

the state was formed, many Israelis in and out of government retained strong affection for the Soviet

Union; predictably, American Jewish leaders kept Israel at arm's length.

From its founding in 1948 through the June 1967 war, Israel did not figure centrally in American

strategic planning. As the Palestinian Jewish leadership prepared to declare statehood, President

Truman waffled, weighing domestic considerations (the Jewish vote) against State Department alarm

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